“I’ve always been a great puzzle to myself.”
—Jo Carol Pierce
I resent anything that isn’t a simple machine, like a push mower or a pair of scissors. I could explode a bicycle into all its component parts in half an hour, lay them on the ground from end to end. I like things with schematics, with blueprints and hard edges. I look away when people let go of helium balloons, disturbed by the endlessness of space. I remember asking my mum how it was possible, that it just keeps on going.
◊ ◊ ◊
I started writing a story in which I die, and after death I find myself in a room, a community hall, with shiplap walls and stacks of folding chairs in the corner. It’s the kind of place that’s been rented out for forty dollars a night since 1995. There are assorted plates and pots in the kitchen, things left over from retirement parties and church conferences, and I find an old tin of iced tea mix in the cupboard. I stir it up in a juice jug, wondering if it’s my job to serve refreshments.
There are tables set out, and everyone I’ve ever had sex with arrives, one after the other. Some recognize one another, and I can hear chairs scraping the floor as they sit down to catch up. Some lean uncomfortably against the wall, fiddle with the buttons on their shirts, scan the faces in the room. They seem to have been transported into the building without warning, cigarettes still burning, work clothes on, one tousling her wet hair with a towel. Some of them see what connects us—Nathan[1] is laughing at the look of discomfort on my face, taking in the people he doesn’t know. He cackles as he recognizes my first girlfriend[2], a short, white woman with uneven dreadlocks and quilted raver pants. Others look around, bewildered. One or two stand looking out the windows—they don’t seem to notice the rest of us. One of these is a blonde woman[3] that I met in San Francisco. It was 2012, I was at my ex-girlfriend’s girlfriend’s birthday party, I borrowed her overalls and we shotgunned beers in the bathtub. At my party, the woman is cleaning under her nails in a way that tells me she thinks she is alone. I wonder who sets the criteria for entry, me, or her? I realize that someone might be here that I can’t see.
My ex-wife is here; she is cold but polite. She’s wearing a Siren Song shirt, frayed at the hem, and I remember the night they played in the basement of the punk bar, their blood harmonies, and I remember Taylor’s[4] inscrutable hostility towards me in the presence of her other lovers. She heads toward at a table at the back of the room, starts slinging back beers. I wonder if she has quit drinking yet, if this is a before or an after or if it’s both. She is sitting with Matty[5], who never got around to telling her we were friends. He raises his eyebrows and laughs as she walks towards him.
◊ ◊ ◊
It’s an exercise I have returned to, a catalog of sex, a study of the accumulated mess of my love life. I have a stack of notes from lovers, in turn confessional, dirty and maudlin. One is written on the back of the jacket lyrics for “This Must Be the Place.” One is written on a piece of steel, each letter stamped hot into the surface[6]. My favorite from Aaron[7], written in pencil and found tucked into a doorframe, reads only: “Ummm, had to leave @ 830 to get there in time, remember? Call me.” I hoped that eventually this collection would tell me something definite about myself, but it’s only gotten messier. Now it contains an envelope earmarked for immigration, proof, in case they ask, that my marriage was real, written in declarations of love and incoherent apologies.
I remember feeling some relief when I got married—suddenly, I had a document that told me how to act. I have a picture of my ex-wife holding our marriage certificate, in the lofty Chattanooga city hall, winking at the camera in paint-covered Carhartt’s. But a certificate is not a blueprint, not a record of what something contains so much as a marker of what has passed. When we finalized our divorce, a friend made me a certificate for that, too. It reads “We are honored to welcome you into the Hot Divorcée Society,” and of the two documents, it looks much better on my wall.
I tried to make a map, one that flattened geography and time, an axis of gender, an axis of depth. It was a scatterplot, like blow paint, and no correlations emerged. I wrote out the big ones, collapsed into snapshot memories: trying to pull off my woolen long johns, doubling through Greenpoint on the back of a road bike, fucking against a boxcar wall somewhere outside of Yuma, Arizona. The stupid mistakes—staying with Jacob[8] as it dawned on me that I was the other woman, fucking Amy[9] on our ex-girlfriend’s living room couch without once considering that we might cause her pain. Then, Nathan meeting me at the airport with a balloon that I kept folded up for years in my bookshelf, Taylor kissing me over her bobbing tube as we floated down the Ocoee River, the letter Austin[10] tucked into my console the morning I left Tennessee.
◊ ◊ ◊
In my story, I watch the room, and wonder if everyone gets this kind of party, or if I have manifested it, a product of my own vacillating identity, my unfinished business. I briefly consider who would show up at my parents’ parties, remembering a teenaged photo booth strip in my mum’s study, two bumping pairs of horn-rimmed glasses.
I count chairs, ask myself if there is one for everybody, tracked by some celestial tally counter. If it was a one-way thing, which direction gets the chair: the fucker or the fucked? I’m surprised that the hall is set up already, and imagine a kind of death party catering staff, which doesn’t seem like something that a party so tailor-made for me should warrant. I was always more of a bring-your-own-lawn-chair type of person.
Claire and Hannah are talking with their heads close, standing by the iced tea jug, and though I try to hide it, I am thrilled that my death has indulged me in such a racy retrospective[11]. This makes up for all the time I spent worrying that no one would come to my birthday party, I think.
Suddenly, I wonder if I should feel embarrassed, which is a feeling that feeds itself, and my face gets hot. I try to catch the eyes of my closest friends, who are unphased, try to ignore the clean-cut looking man at the back who is looking rattled, being walked to a chair by Abigail[12], ever capable. Jamie[13] has noticed Leo[14], and is pointing at me and laughing while Leo tips their hat. I sit down with them, and remind Jamie that they once told me that making out might as well just be a handshake. You taught me everything I know, I say.
◊ ◊ ◊
While rereading Querelle, I dwell on a description of Lysiane, the madam of La Féria. Genet writes: “She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call “ruined,” “fallen,” feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody’s darlings…” (44)
◊ ◊ ◊
When I was seven or eight, some girls in the rec center changeroom asked me if I was a virgin. I insisted I wasn’t; I didn’t know what it meant. I had no Mother Mary to teach me to feel shame about sex, and my parents were cautiously neutral on the subject. I wonder if the consequence of not being raised with religion is that I’ve developed a deep disdain for good judgement.
◊ ◊ ◊
I say I like a simple machine—can that be true when I am so drawn to chaos?
The first time I had sex with Nathan, he told me he thought I was a lesbian, we got blind drunk and walked around the downtown Eastside, in the early morning his roommate Ben walked in on us fucking, he was tripping on acid and demanded a cigarette, I held a sheet over myself halfheartedly. I ran into Ben[15] at a party a couple weeks later, he thought I was someone else, I told him I’d been naked the last time he saw me, we went home together, I snuck out at three am, realized I’d left my keys on his bedside table, had to throw rocks at my roommate’s window to get into my house, he brought me my keys the next morning in the RayCam community center gym where I was standing in line to vote in the provincial election.
The last time I had sex with Tessa[16] was at her weekly sex party. Maybe it wouldn’t be called sex, maybe we were just fucking adjacently, but I remember feeling relieved that she was no longer angry with me, or not so angry that we couldn’t fuck next to each other, since the last time I came to visit I had disappeared, hopped a freight train to Texas with a new sweetheart, a man, to boot, who really didn’t have much to offer except a big dick[17] and a crew change.
When my ex-girlfriend asked me if I “liked the person I had become,” in the kitchen of a party I didn’t expect her to be at, I wondered what the right answer was, if it was even a question. When she met me, I was studying classical music, I didn’t drink; she was reconciling differing versions of me. I sensed that she felt betrayed that I was sleeping with a man, that she was telling me that I wasn’t gay enough, even though I was so high on molly that I would have fucked the mop bucket. The truth was, I did like the person I had become, even though on paper maybe I should have been the bad guy.
◊ ◊ ◊
In 1993, Jo Carol Pierce wrote a cabaret act called “Bad Girls Upset by the Truth,” narrated by a woman whose spiritual mission is to spread the love of Jesus through her many affairs. She says: “I got a bad reputation in my peer group. Lots of my friends were getting married and when they did they would just drop me flat. They claimed that golden wedding rings actually turn to cheap metal in my presence. And my friends that weren’t real mad at me were real worried about me, and everybody was discouraging me from falling in love, they’d say “Jo Carol, why don’t you do something you’re good at?” So, I tried to explain to them why I had to do these very upsetting things. I said, “Look, the reason I cannot pass up a single [man] is that each one of them is just another side of Jesus. And I know that, cause every time I kiss another one of them, I can feel Jesus through his skin, and I need to know Jesus fully.”
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I say I like a simple machine—maybe that’s how I have come to understand my body. I know where it starts and stops, I know how to feed it, to give it space and pleasure.
◊ ◊ ◊
Back to my death: I am moving around the room, speaking to the people I am on good terms with, nodding politely to the strangers. Kristen[18] and Daniel have shown up together, even though I know that they haven’t talked for years in the world of the living. I hug them both. I had forgotten Daniel’s[19] careful eye contact, how good he was with his hands. Later, I remember, someone accused Daniel of sexual harassment, and I had been surprised because he had been so deferential when we fucked that we would find ourselves in strange, polite standoffs, slow check-ins that, frankly, killed the mood.
◊ ◊ ◊
I wrote a song called “Bad at Sex,” I popped out a rib one night, I had to call Jacob in Austria and ask if he had given me an STI. I used to cut open dozens of the tiny foil packets of Vitamin C that we gave out at work; they were meant to break down crystals for injection but I stirred them into little cups of juice when my pH was spiking. I hid a plan B wrapper in the bottom of my laundry hamper when I knew my girlfriend would go through my garbage, a picture of me having sex in a van circulated on an internet forum calling me a cum dumpster, I picked trivial fights with Nathan when he fucked someone else, we broke our own rules when we drank too much, although I never really understood what those rules were.
For a while, I wondered if it was a question of place, that we were watching a plague of toxic drug deaths seep out around us, that so many of us had caught a person in the act of dying, that space was not precious, that we were each other’s’ iron lungs, that we wanted to feel each other’s’ blood flow.
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In his essay “In the Shadow of the American Dream,” David Wojnarowicz describes getting fucked in his car on the side of the highway: “The hallucinatory sensation I recall from the depths of fever is the idea that this guy and I are part of the same vascular system; he and I are two eyeballs sitting in the dark recesses of a metallic skull viewing the world through the windshield the way one’s eyes would if they could proportion and transmit information independent of each other as well as recall separate private histories. The automobile is a vehicle of motion just like the human body, its motor, the brain, claiming or recalling distance and motion and passage.” (Wojnarowicz, 59)
◊ ◊ ◊
Someone asks me to tell him about the wildest places I have had sex. We are flirting, sending confessional text messages across a crowded room. I think about the pulley of a clothesline, the mechanics of this moment of anticipation. For years after I was married, something fogged my sense of desire, and the uncomplicated pleasure I had felt for so much of my life was muddied by an invasive shame. Today, I am relieved to be just a body again. I respond with a message about a night in an empty church many years ago, and feel the tug of pleasure wheeling back and forth between us.
◊ ◊ ◊
At my party, there is no band, there are no speeches. Everyone has settled into the room, and I see a kind of Venn diagram emerge, of the little worlds I have been a part of. Alex and those black block desert punks, my summer in New York, the tender blur of my late twenties in Vancouver. I am trying to draw outlines, trying to weigh what had meaning, but people keep standing up and moving around. Tessa leans back in her chair to talk to Jamie as they walk by. Aaron wanders over to Kevin[20], resting a hand on his shoulder. I’m thirsty. I hover by the kitchen, mopping beads of condensation off the jug of iced tea with the palm of my hand, feeling the satisfying pop of the spigot as I flip it open to pour someone a drink.
[1] Nathan used to play me the Muffs when I was falling asleep at parties, when we were hungover we would take turns going to the corner store for pizza pops and apple juice, we got our picture taken in our jean jackets every year for Christmas, and matching tattoos when we broke up.
[2] Gemma used to call me Dragon, from the Paper Bag Princess. We moved to an island together, stocked shelves at the grocery store and ate mushrooms on the beach. After we broke up she wrote me that I could be as cold as a frozen sacrificial monk, which I held as a point of pride.
[3] Heather?
[4] The first thing Taylor ever said to me was “Are you in that shitty band?” I asked her which one.
[5] Matty has a tattoo above his heart that says “Hard Pisces.” He calls me every so often, always after midnight.
[6] Dustin was a blacksmith, and had the forearm strength to prove it.
[7] Aaron drank Bustelo coffee late into the night, slept during the day, and showed me where Sylvia Federici lived.
[8] Jacob was twice my age, took me to jazz shows and slid his hands up my skirt behind the counter at work.
[9] We rented a car and drove to San Diego, we sang Jagged Little Pill every time we arrived in a new city.
[10] A butcher—whenever I asked him what cut of meat he was cooking, he would trace it with his fingers onto my body, onto my rib or my shoulder.
[11] Claire once sprained both her ankles on her way to a sex party, Hannah loved fucking too much to follow through with her own engagement.
[12] We slept in the loft of the shed she was building, before the roof was installed, on a cold spring night in Tucson.
[13] Jamie used to fight me at every party. For years after we dated, they would sneak up on me in crowded rooms and tackle me to the ground.
[14] Someone once told me that Theo had willed themself to grow sideburns, two cute blonde tufts of hair that framed their cheeky face.
[15] Ben is sober now.
[16] Tessa sent me a smutty advent calendar and taught me how to smoke heroin.
[17] Alex hit me across the face at a hostel in Guatemala, my glasses flew off and skittered across the bed.
[18] Kristen and I had sex in a hallway on my birthday one year, while the rest of the people at the party stepped gingerly around us.
[19] The three of us had scheduled afternoon threesomes in Kristen’s drafty bedroom.
[20] Kevin won me a stuffed elephant at the Brotherton’s diner claw machine, and kisses me on the cheek whenever we say goodbye.
Works Cited
Genet, Jean. Querelle of Brest. London, Faber and Faber, 1973.
Pierce, Jo Carol. “I Got a Bad Reputation in my Peer Group.” Bad Girls Upset by the Truth, CD Baby, 1995.
“This is Jo Carol Pierce,” Texas Monthly.
Wojnarowicz, David. “In the Shadow of the American Dream.” Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintigration. New York, Vintage Books, 1991.
Alicia Gee (she/her) is an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho. She worked in harm reduction for many years, and has been published in The Malahat Review, Sundog Lit, and the Southern Literary Festival Anthology.
